I'm not saying that standards shouldn't be freely viewable, but this isn't that big of a problem or unique to the ISO. There are hundreds of standards for manuf

I'm not saying that standards shouldn't be freely viewable, but this isn't that big of a problem or unique to the ISO. There are hundreds of standards for manufacturing split across dozens of publishers and industry organizations (just for electronics you have JEDEC, IPC, ISO, and then 2-3 more depending on specific application domains). If you're working in industry your company pays the pittance for membership as an organization then you pay the (relative) pittance for the doc and shove the PDF into your company's network store (unless they're jerks and lock it to a device).